For website owners it is often desirable to be able to analyse the traffic on a website, e.g. in order to determine where the traffic originates from, which advertising campaigns were successful in guiding visitors to the website, etc. It may also be desirable for website owners to investigate whether or not certain goals of the website are obtained by the traffic on the website. Such goals may, e.g., include visitors purchasing or ordering products or services, filling in a contact form, requesting a web based demo, ordering a catalogue, staying at the website for a specific time period, etc. Furthermore, it may be desirable for website owners to investigate whether or not visitors return to the website.
Various analytic tools exist which provide the website owner with information regarding the amount of traffic on the website, including the origin of the traffic. Google® Analytics is one example of such a tool. However, these tools provide no, or only little, information regarding the quality of the traffic, i.e. it is not possible to derive which part of the traffic was successful with respect to achieving the goals of the website owner. Furthermore, these tools provide no, or only little, information regarding whether or not visitors return to the website, or why visitors choose to return, or not to return, to the website.
US 2008/0306830 A1 discloses a system for determine session, visitor, advertiser and/or website click quality scores. The system uses a script included in each page of each website monitored by the system to capture data. A method for determining whether a goal is achieved may include assigning a website goal associated with access to a category of a page and recording the achievement of the goal or goals, when a visitor in session accesses a page or pages of the specified category. A subsystem may assist in analysing the quality of visitors, the quality of visitors referred by a particular source, and the quality of a website, including any effects of changes made to the website or in comparison to other websites monitored by the system.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,792,458 B1 discloses a system and method for monitoring and analysing Internet traffic. In one embodiment the system and method include e-commerce analysis and reporting functionality, in which data from standard traffic logs is received and merged with data from e-commerce systems. The system and method can produce reports showing detailed “return on investment” information, including identifying which banner ads, referrals, domains, etc. are producing specific dollars.
None of the prior art documents cited above describe systems or methods providing information to website owners about correlation between value generated during a sequence of visits by a visitor on a website and the origin of the first visit of the sequence of visits.